POLAND: Poland's leading conservative presidential candidate Lech Kaczynski wants to complete the Solidarity revolution which successfully toppled communism in Poland but failed to bring social justice, he said yesterday.
Mr Kaczynski, one of three candidates in the race for the presidential palace ahead of the October 9th poll, said Polish leaders had lost touch with working people and betrayed those who 25 years ago created the Solidarity union and stood up to communist rulers.
"There is no Solidarity without justice," Mr Kaczynski told 7,000 party faithful at a congress held days before celebrations marking the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement.
"What did people who in 1980 raised their heads in the middle of the evil empire want? A worthy and just Poland. We have independence and perhaps an imperfect democracy ... but we have still not delivered justice."
European Union member Poland is set to tilt to the political right in the September 25th general elections and in the presidential polls, with voters angry about high unemployment and an unprecedented amount of sleaze during four years of leftist rule.
"We must turn the country around, to face its citizens. The scale of repair will be so large that Poland will become a new republic," said Mr Kaczynski (56), the popular mayor of Warsaw. His rivals are centre-right liberal Donald Tusk and moderate leftist Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.
If no candidate wins 50 per cent of the vote, as opinion surveys show, a run-off between the top two candidates will be held on October 23rd. Financial markets are concerned a Kaczynski-Tusk run-off would hurt their parties' attempts to form a coalition government and quickly tackle needed budget reforms. A new television ad aired at the convention played on the theme of Solidarity, showing pictures of Mr Kaczynski with the movement's charismatic leader Lech Walesa.
Mr Kaczynski and his identical twin brother Jaroslaw held senior posts under Mr Walesa when he served as Poland's president in the early 1990s, but soon fell out with the Solidarity chief and other leaders of the historic anti-communist movement.
Those battles gave the Kaczynski twins a reputation of trouble-makers and effectively pushed them to the political sidelines until Lech gained popularity as a tough-on-crime justice minister in a right-wing cabinet five years ago.
"It took a long time to get a real conservative party in Poland. We had to learn to campaign by seeing how elections are won in Britain and the United States," said Michal Kaminski, an EU parliament deputy running Mr Kaczynski's campaign.